


Monstrous

by Aramley



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Dark Character, Gen, Murder, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-24
Updated: 2011-09-24
Packaged: 2017-10-24 00:03:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aramley/pseuds/Aramley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Dexter</i> fusion. Charles sees everything, hears everything, and never forgets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monstrous

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at 1stclass_kink for [this prompt](http://1stclass-kink.livejournal.com/8359.html?thread=17165735#t17165735).

"The word _monster_ comes from the Latin, you know. _Monstrum_ ," says Charles, in an even, didactic tone more suited to the lecture theatre than its current setting. "It was used to describe a sign, a disturbance in the natural order. A biological freak. It was later that it came to apply to persons of, shall we say, less than upstanding moral character, a definition with which I should think you'd be very familiar."

"Fuck you," the man on the table spits, acid with terror. "Fuck you, fuck you, _fuck you_."

"What a mouth on you," says Charles. He might be amused, if true amusement was something he could feel. He picks up a pair of rubber gloves, begins to pull them on.

"You'll fucking fry for this," the man says. He's almost sobbing. His fear tastes spiced, jangles brightly in the hollowness inside Charles.

"It's possible," Charles allows. "Though, I must inform you, unlikely."

"I'll kill you."

"Also unlikely." Charles finishes putting on his gloves. His shirtsleeves are already rolled neatly back. The implements gleam in the light of the single bare bulb.

The man's chest heaves with enormous, panicked breaths. "I'll give you anything. Anything you want. Please. I've got a wife."

"I know," says Charles. It's true. He has a wife, whom in spite of everything he does love, in a thin approximation of that emotion that is still closer than anything Charles has managed to manufacture. "I know everything about you. I know about the girls, of course. I know how they made you feel. I know that you'll do it again, just as soon as you find the chance. I know that your mother died when you were four and that you grew up with an aunt who cared little for you and I know that you are afraid of spiders and that you believe JFK was assassinated. I know the first time you ever killed for pleasure - prosaically enough, it was next door's kitten, wasn't it? You truly wouldn't believe the number of people who start that way."

The man's eyes are wide and terrified. "What the fuck are you?"

"I am," says Charles, leaning closer, "in almost every sense of the word, monstrous."

-

Forty-eight hours ago, in a court-room, the man on Charles's table is acquitted of the murder of a twenty-two year old woman. He lies beautifully, with a skill that Charles appreciates in a detached, professional sense. The evidence is slight, and, of course, only Charles has access to the parade of images that flicker with brutal, hypnotic clarity through the man's mind even as he delivers his calm, measured untruths. Coltish bare legs. Bruised thighs. Blood on chipped tile. Blonde hair and brown hair and black - not just one girl, this girl, but many. The images are shot through with an ugly sexual thrill that leaves a sticky film over Charles's mind, and the urge to wash his hands.

In Charles's experience, there are two kinds of minds that commit murder. There is the kind that will kill once, and never again, panicky and jumbled. Then there is the kind that will kill over and over - a mind as sleek and deadly as a knife. He has extensive experience of this latter sort. It is, after all, his own.

"I'm sorry, Moira," he says, after the trial. Her shoulders are slumped slightly, with a defeat she's felt too often.

"You win some, you lose some," she says, tidying up the papers from her desk. The smile she gives him is carefully constructed, and hides an enormous, grey-coloured exhaustion. Through that he sees her image of him - soft-edged, genial, coloured a little with attraction - and mirrors it back to her.

"Let me buy you lunch," he says, and leads her away. Long practice lets him box away the man, and the women, because there will be time for them later.

Forty-seven hours later, the acquitted murderer takes it into his head quite suddenly to drive to a remote location in upstate New York, where he finds a shed and, inside, a surgeon's table and trays of equipment carefully laid out. He undresses himself and seals his clothes into bin-liners he finds ready for him and climbs up onto the table, and none of this seems to him at all strange until he blinks and his surroundings come suddenly into sharp focus, and a young man with a soft, smiling face and very cold blue eyes steps out from the shadows and says, "Hello. My name is Charles Xavier."

-

 

No restraints needed. No duct tape over the mouth. The simplicity is rather beautiful. Anyone who depends on artifice as much as Charles comes to appreciate aesthetics. After all, it's the surface that masks the depths.

"I suppose you know why you're here," Charles says, pleasantly enough.

"They were whores," the man says. His reddened face is twisted up grotesquely with rage and effort, lips flecked with spittle. Charles feels a distant sort of revulsion. " _Whores_ ," the man repeats.

"Oh, be quiet," says Charles, not annoyed, merely bored. He's heard every justifiction, and they are so rarely anything but banal. The man goes silent instantly, mouth and throat working around mute gusts of air.

The trouble with the telepathy is that it makes everything so easy. There are places in the brain that with one brush of Charles's mind would stop the heart, paralyse the lungs, deliver slow or instantaneous death, whichever Charles wished to bestow. Sometimes he kills this way, if the job is too awkward or time too short, and it's a singular thrill to watch from a parked car a short distance away as a man chokes to death on air, the mental flavour of confusion and panic delicious but somehow less satisfying - not food enough for that hollowness inside.

And every intellectual appreciates the incomparable satisfaction of physical exertion. Charles hesitates over the tools; selects, finally, a sawblade. His outlets are, he admits, less conventional than his peers'. Murder is not gardening, or DIY. But no less constructive, he thinks, if practised properly, by the Code.

Charles turns to the man on the table. His fear pumps out hot and red-edged, and Charles breathes it in, lets it warm the cold places inside him. Not enough, not yet; it needs that sharpened edge of agony. Charles steps forward.

"This will be excruciating," he says, politely. "It will last a long time. You will have deserved every second of it."

Here, at least, he never has to lie.


End file.
